I can’t imagine why I watched Masterpiece Mystery when I was young, but every time I watch Sherlock the animation is so familiar to me. It feels like something from my childhood. But it’s not like I watched Hercule Poirot when I was a little kid. And I don’t think my parents did, either.

My high school English teacher, the aforementioned T. David, had a pocket-sized edition of the Oxford English Dictionary that he claimed to have with him at all times. He said it was very helpful when he came across a new word while reading. He was so fond of his tiny OED that one of the first homework assignments he gave us was to buy a pocket-sized dictionary of our very own which was to be deposited in our respective backpacks. (Mine stayed in my backpack for at least a decade. It’s currently somewhere in my office.)

At the time, the whole thing felt like some dumb thing our weird teacher made us do. Who needs to carry a dictionary around at all times? It turns out that I do. Granted, my dictionary now comes in the shape of an app on my phone, but it’s an app I use all the time. All the time. Like today, when I looked at the word “currency” on the rec I was working on and became convinced that it was spelled incorrectly. A few quick taps on my phone assured me that it was correct and I stopped worrying about it.

It’s so strange to look back and realize that your weird high school English teacher was right about something, but it happens.

Is there anything worse than your commute being demonstrably worse than usual For No Discernible Reason? I think not.

Allow me to demonstrate: On a perfect day my commute should take less than 45 minutes, but there’s no such thing as a perfect day during rush hour. I accept that. My commute is normally about an hour, which isn’t really so bad. On Thursday it was two hours due to the two separate accidents that reduced travel down to one lane of traffic. (Which was really, really bad when four lanes had to merge into one.) On Friday it was about 50 minutes because the universe took pity on me (or something). This morning it was almost two hours and I’ll be damned if I can figure out why.

And that’s the thing. When I saw the accidents on Thursday I felt better about the clusterfuck-y traffic because at least there was a reason traffic was fubar. But when I got to the office today I was seething because I was late to work for no reason that I could see.

And I give myself 90 minutes to get to work even though it should never take that long, so if my commute is going to take more than 90 minutes there had better be a fucking reason.

I’m at my parents’ house and I wore a Taking Back Sunday t-shirt today. Apparently I’d never done that before because my dad was very confused by the shirt. Even when I explained that Taking Back Sunday was the name of a band and not a manifesto he was still confused. And there wasn’t really anything I could say to clear up his confusion because I have no idea where Taking Back Sunday’s name came from. It’s the name of one of my favorite bands; I don’t really need to know anything else.

Now I’m going to get into bed and put Sherlock on my TV (yes, again). I may watch the whole episode. I may fall asleep before Alan Cumming finishes reading the names of the rich people who sponsor Masterpiece. Who knows?